voncookie | September 5, 2010
Cleaning my apartment — weekend diversion — I decided to tackle the Gigantic Stack of Paper formally known as My Dissertation. And I decided to organize it. And then I decided — three boxes later — to GET IT THE HELL OUT OF MY APARTMENT. I have a tiny bit of storage space left and [...]
voncookie | May 10, 2010
Yesterday, the pining library at Big U received an enormous giving-back of belated love: I returned my library books that I used for my dissertation. All those dissertation-related books went down the chute at the library and will hopefully not be seen again (by me) for a very long time. Thus, this is the last [...]
voncookie | March 30, 2010
The third signature wasn’t anticlimactic per se, it was simply another pleasant meeting with Overlord #2. We talked shop, chewed over my summer course, talked about my need for a job next year. As these topics started to dwindle, Overlord #2 looked at me and said, “I think you have something for me to sign?” [...]
voncookie | March 20, 2010
Outside Reader Guy says, as I make myself comfortable in his office and start to pull out the envelope that has my signature pages in it: “Why don’t you give them to me now to sign, so that you’re not wondering the whole time whether I’m going to sign or not.” He whisks out a [...]
voncookie | March 17, 2010
Yesterday I began my quest for signatures. Since at Big U there’s no longer any defense of the dissertation, it is simply up to one’s Overlords and Readers to either approve the work, or ask for more revisions. I’ve finally passed the point of revision, and now it’s all about finding the Overlords and the [...]
voncookie | March 9, 2010
As maria callas pointed out, there have been a lot of numbers floating around my blog lately. And yesterday, TooBeaut drew my attention to the fact that all these numbers, plus tweets about NaNoWriMo and such sort of add up to something: I am in search of the Next Big Project. Now that The Market [...]
voncookie | March 2, 2010
So, I think it’s time for a big, über-reflective post on my writing process, now that I’ve turned in my spiral-bound “tocho” that is my dissertation. (For those of you not in the know — I certainly wasn’t, in spite my supposed fluency in Spanish — a “tocho” is a big fat tome of a [...]
voncookie | February 27, 2010
Well, I’ve got a pile of composition drafts upon which I must comment tonight and tomorrow so that I can hand them back on Monday. They should have been handed back on Friday, but last week was akin to the Swan Song of my dissertation– long, beautiful, plaintive: FINISH ME. FINISH ME… FIN. ISH. MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! [...]
voncookie | February 21, 2010
11:25 a.m. Made it through 18 minutes of “A Prairie Home Companion” before I had to shut it off. Working in silence while reformatting my footnotes is preferable to Garrison Keillor’s long-winded-ness, and the way they seem to talk over each other in the skits. I hate that. Anyway! The footnotes are coming along fairly [...]
voncookie | February 17, 2010
Blessed be EndNote that formatted my perfect footnotes all these many months of writing. And cursed be MLA style that demands I reformat nearly all of them so that they’re all parentheticals. I have 326 pages of double spaced glory (now condensed to 207 as I’ve had to reformat that too so that it’s single [...]
voncookie | February 5, 2010
4:44 pm, Friday So, I got back my conclusion today from one of the Overlords, and revisions are going to be minor, which is good, because there will have to be a minor rewrite for the section that I just rewrote in the long-suffering Ch4. So that leaves the following for me to do on [...]
voncookie | January 16, 2010
Today I start work on tidying up my Conclusion to the dissertation. After this, there will just be four pages from Ch5 to tackle, the Introduction, and whatever the Overlords deem that I need to edit in the long-suffering Ch4. Not much, really, but not quite at the “tweaking” stage, although that of Ch5 could [...]
voncookie | December 24, 2009
It occurs to me that at Big Scary Convention this year, everybody is going to be bringing their best game. Actually, they’ll be bringing their best game + 1. Everyone will be putting about 200% into their interviews. And so I’ve decided to do the same… starting with my teaching portfolio. I’ve decided to put [...]
voncookie | December 14, 2009
What did I accomplish in my Jesus Year… I was supposed to use this year for reflection on the good things that I’ve done so far in this existence. Instead, it ended up being one of the most royally f***ed-up years of my entire life. There were some good points, some highlights: “graduating” (but not [...]
voncookie | December 12, 2009
11:15 a.m. My grandmother things I’m done with my dissertation. She thinks I’m Dr. vonCookie. I didn’t have the heart to explain to her about the difference between “graduation” and “filing.” I got the feeling she was disappointed in me. Why? Because when I walked in the door, she called me “doctor”; I didn’t have [...]
